NickProach, CEO of Proach Models,left from Canada specializing in building most exacting precise scale aerospace models in the business for museums, government agencies, private collectors and even astronaunts at SpacefestVI at Pasadena Convention Center May 8-11. (Photo by Walt Mancini/Pasadena Star-News)

PASADENA >> An annual festival celebrating science fiction and science fact has taken over the Convention Center.

Spacefest VI — created in the heart of Tucson, Ariz. by Sally and Kim Poor — is invading Pasadena Convention Center this weekend. It will feature panels of astronauts including Buzz Aldrin, art vendors and science movies. This is the first time the annual event will be in Pasadena; usually, it stays in Arizona.

“There’s a lot of interest with what’s going on in the area,” Sally Poor said in reference to Caltech and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Canada Flintridge. “We love the locals.”

The event officially kicked off Thursday evening. A full schedule of Spacefest events is available on the Spacefest website. Tickets can be purchased online or at the door, but only the $275 limited-access “stellar” package is still available. At least 300 tickets were sold in advance, Sally Poor said.

The Poors own Tucson-based Novaspace Galleries, which includes Astronaut Central (astronaut autographs and space memorabilia) and Nova Space artwork and prints. It was those resources that allowed them to pull together Spacefest, which started in 2007 in Mesa, Ariz. Spacefest II was held in 2009 in San Diego, and Spacefest III was held in 2011 in Tucson. It has been held annually since then.

“We can contact these astronauts, have access to all these speakers, so we decided to put on this big festival and call it Spacefest,” Sally Poor said.

Twenty astronauts representing several NASA missions will field audience’s questions. Edgar Mitchell, the sixth moonwalker while aboard Apollo 14 in 1971, is one of the panelists. He said every time he does speaking engagements, he’s always asked what it’s like to walk on the moon, where gravity is one-sixth of what it is here.

“It’s like walking in a desert, because it’s soft, you sink in,” Mitchell said. “But we practiced everything that we did there over and over and over again until it was second nature. It was just doing it in a different venue.”

Seattle couple Kendra Williams David Brown — “space geeks,” Brown says — have been following Spacefest hoping it would make it closer to home. They missed the year Spacefest was in San Diego but made sure to attend this year’s in Pasadena.

“I love everything space, always have,” Williams said. “I grew up in the Kennedy age, so it’s part of my DNA, and I just can’t get enough of it.”

Brown said he is most looking forward to having access to the Apollo astronauts while there is still time.

“They’re dying,” Brown said. “These guys are the best of the best. They’re American heroes.”

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Dee O’Hara, nurse to NASA’s first seven astronauts, and actor Richard Hatch, star of, among other shows, “Battlestar Galactica,” will also be at Spacefest this weekend.

For the science fiction portion of Spacefest, visitors can tour the artwork on display by about a dozen vendors. Some art is more fantastical and looks like it would belong on Syfy Channel. Other artists, like Simon Kregar Jr. of Tucson, take a more realistic approach, displaying portraits of Albert Einstein, Carl Sagan and Neil deGrasse Tyson and free-floating astronauts in space.

“I’ve been an artist my whole life. It’s really been in the last three or four years that I’ve wanted to refocus what I do into promoting science, and promoting that golden era of space age that we have in the U.S.”

Brown said conventions like Spacefest should re-engage an interest in science.

“I wish more people were excited about this stuff. I wish NASA didn’t have to fight for budget,” Brown said. “I grew up watching the space program, and I’m frustrated that we haven’t gone farther.”